[gamelib-cvs] stick.html

Wed Dec 27 16:29:59 UTC 2006

Update of /project/gamelib/cvsroot/source/doc
In directory clnet:/tmp/cvs-serv968/doc

Added Files:
	stick.html 
Log Message:
IM
  Initial check-in

--- NEW FILE: stick.html ---
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
 <head>
 <title>Gamelib - games-3d library</title>
 <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../style.css"/>
 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"/>
</head>
<body>
 <div class="header">
  <h1>Gamelib</h1>
  <h2>The joystick library</h2>
 </div>

<h3>Introduction</h3>

Having the use of a joystick enhances the sensation of presence in a
game. Under linux, the available joystick API is based around periodic
reading of events from a device driver file (usually /dev/jsX
or /dev/input/jsX).

Gamelib now offers an interface to handle joysticks on the linux
platform (code for joystick handling on other platforms is
welcome). The joystick is somewhat abstracted from the raw data that
the device driver offers.

<h3>API</h3>

The interface is centred around a JOYSTICK object (created by calling
MAKE-STICK with a suitable device name as argument). To read an event
from the device driver, call UPDATE-STICK with the joystick object as
argument.

Under SBCL (with thread support) there is a "continous poll" support
(simply call CONTINOUS-POLL with the joystick object as argument, to
terminate the polling thread, call TERMINATE-POLL with the object as
argument). All relevant locking is done, keyed on if a joystick is
polled or not

There are two arrays that are of interest in a joystick object
js. The first is the analog axes, (axes js) and the
second is the buttons (buttons js). The library currently
supports up to 8 analog axes and up to 24 buttons (and will most
likely crash in amusing ways, should these limits be too strict).